Like most Mississippians who grew up in a small town and left it, I have a complicated relationship with the place where I grew up. I went to public school from kindergarten through 12th grade in Wayne County, which I’ve gotten used to telling people is “an hour south of Meridian and an hour east of Hattiesburg,” since most of my fellow Jacksonians have never heard of it and don’t know where it is.
On paper, I should have no reason to have such a complicated relationship with my hometown: I was valedictorian of my graduating class; my parents and grandparents are well-respected in the community; and I even taught middle school there for a year after college. I think it was my year of teaching junior high in Wayne County that really solidified for me all the reasons that I could not live there permanently.
Early on that year, I heard a student gasp when I mentioned that I’d spent the weekend with college friends in Hattiesburg, which was less than an hour away from the school. “I’ve never been there,” she exclaimed. “To Hattiesburg?” I asked in disbelief, blinded by my own privilege. “No,” she said enviously. “I’ve always wanted to go. I’ve heard they have a mall there.” She said “a mall” with the same awe I would use to refer to the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum.
Later in the school year, my favorite student (not that we’re supposed to have favorites, but all teachers do) told me reluctantly when I asked what he wanted to be when he grew up: that he supposed he wanted to work on an oil rig or on a pipeline. “You don’t sound convinced,” I told him. “I mean, I want to be an engineer or an architect,” he confessed. “But my parents think college is for uppity people.”
I did not point out that I was one of those uppity people. I supposed he and his parents already knew that, but I mourned for both of them. How could a parent discourage their own children from attending college? Or fail to take them even to the nearest movie theater by the time they were 12 years old? Well, I suppose the answer is because small towns are insular and get more so with every passing generation. It was true even when I was young, even though I had parents who took me on trips—not only to the mall, but also to unthinkable places like San Francisco and New York City and Disney World.
My college friends, who were as nerdy as I was, told me about writing camps and theater groups and school trips abroad. Even all these years later, I cannot imagine what having ready access to things like that might have done for 12-year-old Taylor, who never really fit in. Because I went to public school, though, I at least knew that they existed. I kept a notebook full of all the places I wanted to see: the lost city of Pompeii in Italy, the Mayan ruins in the Yucatan, Big Ben in England. I saw all three of those places last year, and I thought about the teachers who’d told me about them, who told me that college was not for uppity people but was instead another way of being and knowing and seeing.
I am lucky enough to have heard those things at home, too, but I think of my students who did not and for whom the public-school system is their only passport to seeing beyond our insular hometown and into the wider world beyond. And I think, too, of the recent executive order to begin the dismantling of the Department of Education, of my state Legislature’s continued insistence on introducing school-choice bills. That is, they are pulling apart the mechanism by which kids from my hometown and other small towns like it can learn about a world that extends beyond their own backyard and acquire the skills they need to live in that world.
I have three college degrees and three jobs, and the foundational skills I needed for all of them were acquired at Waynesboro Elementary School, Waynesboro Middle School (which, I might add, was housed in the building that held what was once the only school for Black students in the county), and Wayne County High School. This is true for so many of my classmates.
Yet, many parents—both in Wayne County and across the nation—seem content for their children’s horizons to dim at the hands of overreaching leaders that come, like the backwoods preachers of my hometown would tell you, like a thief in the night. Those same preachers would say that we must remain on guard, and so I suppose this editor’s note is my way of reminding you to remember the common good that comes from the education of our children.
This MFP Voices opinion essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.